Ciccio Damplo's first book has been at the top of the charts for eight weeks. It is sixty percent photographs, thirty percent philosophical reflections on Sicilian cuisine, and ten percent recipes that he himself describes as "deliberately incomplete."
Publisher Mondadori had asked for a recipe book. Ciccio Damplo delivered something else. "The Art of Deconstruction" was released in January and within three weeks had sold out the first print run of thirty thousand copies. The second sold out before distribution. The third is in print. The editor who had initially objected to the format — "it's not a cookbook, it's a photographic essay" — stopped objecting.
The book is divided into five sections: The Origins (Mineo, the family, his mother's soffritto); The Technique (photographs of hands working ingredients, no explanatory text: "The hands explain themselves"); The Philosophy (forty pages of reflections on Mediterranean Affective Deconstructionism, his culinary theory); The Emotions (letters from clients who cried, in chronological order); and The Recipes (eleven recipes, each with at least one missing ingredient or a deliberately unspecified temperature).
"I don't want people cooking like me at home," Ciccio explained at the Milan launch, before three hundred people who had paid seventy-five euros each to attend. "I want them to understand why what I do is different from what they do. Then they can come to me and eat it." The audience applauded. Seven people booked a table directly from the venue.
The literary critics — not the gastronomic ones, the literary critics — described the book as "a document on contemporary culinary ego of rare honesty." Ciccio described the review as "a bit long, but correct." He had that one framed too.
